Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples Rock the Hard Rock in Las Vegas 05/15

Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples stopped in Vegas on the Not Redy 2 Leave tour. The tour has already taken them through the east coast and after Vegas they finish off with some stops in Texas and Arizona. Remy Banks of World’s Fair is support on the tour and local indie opener Ekoh opened Friday night’s Vegas show at the Hard Rock Café on the Strip.

Earl Sweatshirt’s popularity continues to grow and his fans seem as passionate as ever, especially about his old music, something he let crowd know he was bored of playing. After rapping the entirety of his new album “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside” (not in order the Vince Staples cut was played at the beginning) he told the audience they did their part and now he’ll play the songs he wrote when “he was 14” and the crowd went wild when he played songs like “Earl” off of his mixtape from 2010 and “Orange Juice” the one and only EarlWolf song.

My guess is that this is one of the nicer venue’s Earl has played during this tour. The Hard Rock Café like most things Hard Rock is filled with music memorabilia, records nailed to the wall and employs plenty of security. The Hard Rock is nice, but a little too upscale in general for it to ever become one of my favorite venues. Despite the corporate feel of the location the crowd was ready and his fans were in full force.

One of the best things about Earl’s performance was the zero set up time between his set and his opener’s set Vince Staples. Vince finished his music and Earl came right out and the duo performed all the songs on which they share features. Vince walked off stage sick but still victorious and Earl took over.

The new album has been out just long enough that the crowd was feeling many of the songs. On my first listen of IDLS,IDGO I tweeted:

7) Very muted beats. Very dark. Sounds like Earl wants to make the worst set of songs to perform live he can.

Earl’s beats in a live setting still had a dark and personal feel, but the tweet showed me I either need better speakers or I should just listen to everything on my headphones. Earl’s style is like hip hop chamber music, made for medium sized venues and like most hip hop translate best when fans who love the music are around. The Odd Future attitude was strong present too:

“We’re gonna do some call and response, don’t be that motherfucker that don’t participate.”

The only real negative at the show was no vinyl. Bullshit.

The aforementioned Vince Staples also had many people familiar with his music. Vince Staples is the odd man out of Odd Future and a clear friend of Earl’s. There has been some press in the past about Earl’s other friend Tyler the Creator not liking Vince. So hip hop beefs with friends in middle, but the beef isn’t real. It’s one of the things that makes Vince interesting and something I was curious to see crowd reaction, because the people that love Tyler, really love Tyler. Odd Future has a weird fan base,so the unexpected is expected.

Vince came out like Michael Jordan or Dirk (not like James Harden who sat on the bench and watched his team come back), despite having a flu he got up and killed it. His new songs had audience participation and his old stuff including tracks from “Hell Can Wait” also killed. Vince has rapping ability, I want to see him grow and set himself apart from the pack. I want to see him find that special thing. Excited for his first official release “Summer Time ‘06” which comes out June 30th.

Remy Banks opened and he talked about New York a lot. He was good, I’m not familiar with a lot of his music. I do like World’s Fair and posted music from them in the past. I enjoyed his set enough to check out his mixtape “higher” when it drop on May 18th.